Ask a manager whether they are giving difficult feedback and the answer is usually yes. Look at what was actually said and it is often something else: an email to the whole team about the state of the kitchen, a review that says keep doing what you are doing, a friendly word at someone’s desk, a project that has quietly changed hands. Each of these lets the manager feel that the thing has been raised. Nobody on the receiving end could tell you what they were being asked to do.
Five things managers say instead of the real thing
Substitution has a small repertoire. The same five moves turn up again and again, each standing in for a conversation with a name.
- The all-team reminder aimed at one person. An email goes to the whole team about the shared fridge or keeping shared spaces clean, and one person is the reason it was sent. Everyone reads it and most people feel told off for something they did not do, and the person it was actually about reads it as being aimed at somebody else. Standing in for: “The hygiene conversation”.
- The softened review. The annual review of the most experienced person on the team says “strong year, keep doing what you are doing”, with one line about “sharing your knowledge more” buried in the development box. The manager has three specific examples in their head and none of them made it onto the form. Standing in for: “Feedback to someone with 20 years more experience than you”.
- The “just checking in” that never checks anything. Six weeks after a conversation about late reports, the manager stops by the desk: “How’s it all going with the reports?” The person says fine, the manager says great and both of them know the reports are still late. Standing in for: “The follow-up, when nothing has changed”.
- The quiet rerouting of work. The project they think of as theirs starts arriving in someone else’s inbox. First a colleague is “brought in to help”, then the client meetings move, then one Monday the update is presented by someone else and nobody has said a word. Standing in for: “Taking the work back”.
- The praise that is really a request. “You’ve been brilliant on the account side, which is exactly why we’d love you to pick up more of the coordination work.” The person says thank you and goes home unsure what just happened to their job. Standing in for: “The change you did not choose”.
What the five have in common is the feeling they leave the manager with: something has been said, so the box is ticked. On the other side of the desk, nothing has.
It is the reaction they are avoiding, not the person
Managers substitute because they are picturing the reaction: the face, the silence, the question about who did get it, the complaint that ends up with HR. Each of the five dodges lets the manager feel the problem has been raised without any of that happening.
None of this is indifference. Watch the same manager with someone they are not afraid of and the feedback is usually direct, specific and kind. What is missing is any practice at using it on someone who might push back, and that practice does not come with the title.
In CMI and YouGov’s 2023 survey of UK managers, 82% reported that they had not had any formal management and leadership training when they entered a management position. CMI and YouGov, Taking Responsibility: Why UK plc needs better managers, October 2023, UK employees with management experience
So the dodge is what a capable person does with a job they were handed before anyone trained them for it. They reach for the nearest thing that looks like feedback without the risk: an email to everyone, a compliment with a request folded inside it or a form that says keep going.
The person does not know. The team does.
Start with the person. They do not know. They cannot fix what nobody named, so they carry on, and when it finally surfaces in a review, a missed promotion or a project that has quietly moved, it lands as a betrayal. Everyone knew except them.
The team does know. An all-team message punishes the people who were already doing it right and tells everyone that this manager will not say the hard thing to one face. From then on, compliments, check-ins and reshuffles get read for what they might really mean. Compliments start to sound like warnings. Decisions appear to happen by drift. The colleague who received the rerouted project has more work, no explanation and a teammate who now resents them.
When the informal route has run out, the only conversation left is the one with a procedure attached, and it arrives carrying every earlier conversation that was never had. The first honest sentence the person hears is the one that comes with paperwork.
Put the thing in the first sentence
The difference between the dodge and the real conversation usually sits in the first sentence. Before it is finished, the other person has worked out what this is about, what you are asking for and whether they are in trouble. Get it right and the rest of giving difficult feedback is about the thing itself rather than about how you raised it. Three things make the sentence work, and one thing makes it land.
- Name the thing first. Not after the small talk and not after a compliment. The topic is the first thing they hear.
- Say what you want from the conversation in the same breath. A decision, a plan, a handover, their view. If you cannot name what you are asking for, the conversation is not ready to have.
- Leave them a reply that is not a defence. A question, a choice or a fact to put right. A verdict invites an argument. A question invites an answer.
- Then stop talking. The first sentence has done its job. The silence after it is theirs, and the urge to fill it is the last dodge of all.
Here is what that looks like for the fourth dodge on the list, the project that has quietly changed hands. Instead of bringing a colleague in to help and hoping the person works it out, the manager sits down with them and says:
“I’m moving [the project] to [name] from [date], because [reason]. [The other work] stays with you, and I want to know what you need from me to make the handover clean.”
Everything the person would otherwise have pieced together from the corridor is in the first sentence: what is moving, when and why. What they keep is said before they have to ask. The ending hands them something practical to answer, so when the reply is about trust, and it often is, the manager has already said what they keep. Fill the brackets with what you already know. The shape is the point.
That sentence and the seven others, each with the line for when they push back, are in our guide The opening line: exact words for eight conversations managers dread. For why managers avoid the conversation at all, and what the wait costs, read our post on why managers avoid difficult conversations and what it costs.
Who is it for? If the honest answer is one name, it is not an email. It is a conversation with that person, and the hardest part of it is one sentence.
The first sentence, said out loud, with someone pushing back
Our Difficult Conversations training puts managers into role-play with their own anonymised scenarios. They say the opening line out loud, get pushed back on and go again, so the version that counts is not the first time they have heard themselves say it. Half a day, onsite or online.
Enquire about Difficult ConversationsThis article is general information for employers and people leaders and is not legal or HR advice. The management training figure is from the Chartered Management Institute report Taking Responsibility: Why UK plc needs better managers, with surveys conducted by YouGov and published in October 2023. It describes UK employees with management experience and whether they had received any formal management and leadership training at the point they entered a management position. It is not a figure for how many current managers have never been trained, which the same report puts at 33%.